[Pan-users] Re: Newsfeed

[Beartooth]

On Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:23:16 +0000, Duncan wrote:

> Beartooth <address@hidden> posted
> address@hidden,
> excerpted below, on  Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:12:34 +0000:
        [...] 
> Sounds like you no longer have authorization to use that server -- or at
> least the swva server is of that opinion...

        Their service had been dropping off, I don't know why, for weeks 
before they announced they were getting out of the business. On advice, I 
tried asking them whether they were selling or trashing the equipment -- 
hoping, in the former case, to be able to go with a successor. No dice; 
as it happens, I can't get to that gadget, to return it -- and they don't 
care.
        [...]
> The no headers thing... I'm not sure.  It could mean the groups aren't
> active (the server doesn't get an active feed for them) on the servers
> you still have.

        Bburg.general, for just one town, has been fairly inactive lately 
-- but not completely. Other groups, like va.general and va.forsale, are 
rarely inactive longer than a day or three.

> There is, however, at least one pan bug that occasionally causes it not
> to see messages on a group.  This bug has to do with messages cross-
> posted to groups you've been following for awhile, but other than that
> I've not been able to nail it down at all.  But pan won't fetch messages
> for the group when it hits that bug.  If you start a new pan instance or
> wipe the data on the old one, so pan forgets about the cross-posted
> messages on the groups you've already been following, you can then
> download messages for the new group without a problem, so it's obviously
> a pan-side data bug, not a bug with the server or whatever.

        By wipe do you mean, for instance, moving all of .pan2 to some 
temporary location?? Or just the Groups folder in it? Or ...?

> I have a couple groups I'd like to follow but don't, because of this
> bug.  It's very frustrating!  I wish I could say for sure whether you
> are seeing the same bug or whether it's something simple, but I don't
> know enough about the bug /or/ your setup to say --- UNLESS you can say
> with relative certainty that there were no cross-posts between the
> groups that don't seem to be getting messages and others you follow.

        Are you talking recent cross-posts by me? All by me? All period 
-- i.e., any ever by anyone? Ad does "others" mean all of mine? 
Rec.food.cooking, for instance, is subject to all the spam, cross-posts, 
and other ills known to usenet. The grc groups are almost completely free 
of such things.

> In any case, one thing you CAN try (other than deleting your entire set
> of pan data and starting over), is going into the group in question and
> telling it to get ALL headers, not just new ones.  

        With news.swva.net gone, bburg.general and bburg.forsale have 
disappeared from my list of subscriptions; and a search for bburg gets no 
hits at all.

        Va.general and va.forsale are still on the list, and "get all 
headers" got nothing. 

> Then ensure you have
> view read messages toggled on, and maybe the new messages will show up
> as already read.  

        Where is that toggle? I don't find it. 

        Btw, I often delete what look to be uninteresting threads; in a 
couple of quiet groups, I've been known to delete everything. I don't 
recall whether any of these geographic groups are among them. Would that 
matter?

        I tried unsubbing va.forsale and then resubbing it, telling Pan 
at several points to get all headers. I never got any.

> If your problem is the above bug, this won't help. 
> But it's also possible it's just a server mixup, in which case it might.
>  If you are actually getting messages that way but pan thinks they're
> all read, there's a fix for that.  I'll not try to explain it here, but
> if that's what you're seeing, ask and I will in a new reply.

        I wasn't seeing a list of headers all marked read. I wasn't 
seeing any headers at all. Just a blank white header pane and a blank 
white body pane.

>>      I'm thinking I need yet another server besides motzarella; got
>> any good ones??
> 
> Perhaps the "gold standard" is giganews, if you decide to go paid.  They
> aren't what one would call "cheap", but they put a lot of effort and
> money into ensuring that their news service is the best connected
> possible, and if giganews doesn't have the post, it's relatively safe to
> say few servers beyond the one the original poster used to post the
> message, got it.  Giganews /does/ have some cheaper text-only accounts,
> tho, I believe.  That sounds like what you may be interested in.

        Verizon used to subcontract to Giganews for its feed(s), and I 
seem to recall once having some other provider that did, too. And 
news.verizon.com used to have not only the bburg and va hierarchies, but 
even the vatech one. And if memory serves, there were no limits.

>>      Iow, if I have to use one I pay for, set that to a lower
>> priority, right? Do all feeds charge the same way -- i.e., by
>> bandwidth, or by flat rate? Or is it a howling chaos out there?
> 
> "Howling chaos" is a pretty apt description.  I don't believe it's quite
> as bad as shopping for a cell phone service, but it's not far from it,
> either.  There's all sorts of plans and prices based on all sorts of
> criteria for all sorts of purposes and usage patterns out there.
> 
> The saving grace for you is that you've said you aren't particularly
> interested in binaries.  That means MUCH lower traffic, and
> consequently, that you can knock off the expensive options right off the
> bat.

        Is there any easy way to get a handle on my traffic? If I can get 
back to all the groups I want to follow, there'll be fifty or sixty of 
them, ranging between ones I check at least once a day, and ones I don't 
check even once a month. There'll also be some where I read almost 
everything, and some where I delete 90% and up without reading.

        Giganews's bottom ("jade") offer is 3 GB/mo, for $2.99 (which, I 
*think*, is also per month).

> Text-only also means that you're likely to be able to find a free server
> that will work well for you if you try hard enough.  Many folks like
> motzarella, which comes well recommended as a free server tho I've never
> tried it.

        You seem to be telling me it is possible only to search provider 
by provider for groups; not to search for a group and find out which 
providers carry it. Right? 

> But, if you just want something that works and don't mind paying a bit,
> for text-only, there's lots of paying options out there too.  You can
> get anything from block accounts, say 25 GB for $15 or $25 or some such,
> which don't expire and should last a very long time (very likely over
> two years for 25 GB on text-only), to the few dollars a month services
> like giganews and others offer.  As I mentioned, giganews has a
> reputation as the gold-standard and for text you can likely get by with
> their cheapest account, if you don't mind paying a bit to just get the
> best and forget about it.  Personally, I've never had a paid account
> with them, but that's because I do binaries too on occasion (tho rarely
> these days), and for binaries, while they are the gold standard, there's
> cheaper and almost as good, which is where I've gone.
 
        Are you saying you pay a flat fee, once, for a set number of GB, 
and not again till you've used that up? All the plans at giganews.com 
that I see today seem to charge per month. They also have a 10-day trial 
period that's download-only -- you can't post. (I suppose you could 
arrange to skip that, though they don't say how.)
 
>>> Since all the gmane groups, for instance, will only be on the gmane
>>> server, it'll only grab them from there.  Same, I expect, with the grc
>>> groups, etc, from the grc server only.
>> 
>>      That's fer sartin shore. Steve Gibson is as close to the world
>> champion of computer defenses as any one person I know of.
> 
> This gets OT, but while I do respect his knowledge, he does have enough
> of the salesman in him to be quite offensive to some.  I do still
> recommend him for MS users, but with the caveat that they take the self-
> sales-pitch he offers with a rather large grain of salt.  If people can
> do that, he's a good source of security information.  If they're
> offended by the sales pitch or gullible enough to be taken in by it, for
> them, there are probably better (less offensive and/or more neutral)
> sources for the same info.  But he has a VERY good way of being able to
> break it down into the basics for the people that might not otherwise
> get or understand the vital security info he teaches -- as long as you
> aren't too offended or taken in by the self-sales-pitch at the same
> time.

        Well, I yield to no man (nor woman either) in puncto detestation 
of the Gates of Hell and all his works. I boot to an XP drive, or boot an 
XP laptop, maybe once every month or two, to get my GPSs to talk to my 
legacy software (and hope soon to stop even that); so I run ZoneAlarm, an 
anti-virus, and an anti-spyware, and call that good enough. Otoh, there 
are a lot of other good people on Gibson's groups, besides Gibson himself 
-- those are the best places I know to go when I do have M$-related 
questions, as for instance trying to get Wine to run Garmin.

>>> That's why I've repeated it several different ways now. =:^)
>> 
>>      Duncan, I can always count on you. I wish you were on more of the
>> groups I follow.
> 
> Thanks for the kind words. =:^)

        Praise where praise is due.

-- 
Beartooth Staffwright, PhD, Neo-Redneck Linux Convert
Remember I know precious little of what I am talking about.